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I need to knock the seven-days-a-week heavy drinking on the head. Really, today my skin feels like sand paper and my brain feels like it is covered in cotton wool. However, I really don’t fancy reducing my social nature – I like my friends and I want to see them.

I know there are a brave few on here that don’t drink, but you’re not really an attainable goal. More looking for strategies to increase my will power when on a Tuesday someone says “want another pint?” and I really want to say yes.

Or alternatively abuse me for being a pussy/for being really weak willed/etc. Or anecdotes of why this is a bad idea. Yeah talk me out of self improvement…
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I'm no big drinker now but if there was some activity other than having a chat then i'd be less likely to get smashed. Like, if you go and watch a film, you could meet for some food beforehand (easy enough to drink something non-alcoholic with food, i find). or limit yourself to a couple of drinks.

What I was going to say is that I have a similar problem, or rather did. As I get older I really struggle with my hangovers, and coming in to work with a hangover is not doable as I'm meeting and greeting clients and have a huge heap of responsibility.

I'm the kind of person who would rather not go out at all than to go out and not drink. Once I get a taste for it I tend to get a bit excessive.

I'm a bit done making a tit out of myself for everyone else's amusement.

makes you feel so much better. Sharper brained, you look and feel totally better. However, it's pretty boring to go out drinking and not drink.

So I have a couple of nights having 2 or 3 quiet beers with a friend (drinking with a girl helps), a couple of nights relaxing at home, drinking tea and watching stuff, and a couple of days getting totally fucked.

And she once went to her doctor feeling ill to be told she had quinine poisoning.

*Have you been taking malarial medication?*, her doctor asked.

*No*, she said, *is there another way to get quinine poisoning?*

"Well,*, the doctor replied, *there is quinine in tonic water, but to get enough to give you poisoning, you would have to drink a lot of G&Ts... I mean, a whole bottle of gin a day, alongside the accompanying tonic.*

Not really any advice to be given on the subject, really. If you're worried about how much you drink - drink less. An easy way of doing this is by just drinking slower and limiting yourself to x drinks per evening. Or making every other drink a non-alcoholic one. Or something like that. And if your friends are the sort of `friends` who will take the piss then, y'know, fuck 'em.

You can see your friends without getting smashed every evening. It's a situation you're totally in control of. If you don't want to be in control of it, then that's your choice.

I think i'm done with boozing. I feel asleep in a film festival last night and missed the film that my friend had made (and whihc he had allowd me to scribble on. I scored 'I LOVE FLEETWOOD MAC' into the film and drew pug faces. It was apparently hilarious, but I was having a lovely snooze on the sofa at the hackney picturehouse when it came on.

It all kicked off with myself and my other half end of nov/beginning of dec and i feel that i've not really stopped since then!
Spent a fucking obscene amount of money on booze in the last 10 weeks or so. I've also started smoking a lot more than i ever have done.
I need a rest.
All that being said i wouldn't say no to a fair few beers with your good self! :)

sometimes it's a right ballache. in the brudenell when we were there for deerhoof i was driving so i wanted to drink tea. the girls behind the bar made a right fuss over how great of them it was to allow me a cup of tea and demanded i brought the mug back. of course i'll bring the mug back. also jordan got me a brew in the castle when he was last in manchester. it was a life saver.

so I tend to avoid alcohol situations during the week as I know it'll end badly as i always go out with the intention of a few drinks but then get smashed.

I'd rather meet my friend for a coffee one evening rather than go to a pub, get carried away, get smashed, spend far too much and have a hangover. The reason I see my friends is to have a nice catch up and see what they're up to as we're all busy and sometimes alcohol can overshadow actually talking and ends up being a bit gibberisy/jokey/not taking about their life/problems etc.

Or you could have people over to yours to hang out?

I'm not sure if you can train yourself to have better will power. I try so hard sometimes but it never works. Doing this yoga thing kind of helps as I could only managed two half pints of cider at the weekend before I was done with it.

It's hard as nails but quite a spiritual thing to do. Seriously, you have to look into yourself, there's no escaping your personality and you're forced to deal with things and situations you'd normally approach with drink.

It's difficult but then if it wasn't it wouldn't be so fucking rewarding.

and still hung about with drunk friends and it was all okay and banterous. A few times I went to parties, which was alright because I was able to keep track of conversations, and was still quite alert at 5am because I wasn't being dulled into sleep by The Alcohol.

as the main reasons I'm skipping booze is to ty and trim down a bit (also, poor). Pubs usually make up lime and soda proper strong so I may as well be on fat coke, and I can't bring myself to specifically order weak lime and soda.
There's basically nowt you can get with no sugar and no caffeine. Water I guess?

and I'm pretty sure I've paid some obscene prices for soft drinks. Got a cider and a pint of OJ and soda from a pub in crouch end (admittedly I already knew this place was a bit of a rip) - £7.50. Jesus.

I've not been deliberately cutting back on The Alcohol, but I think my body is going "This is rubbish", so I tend to have quenched my taste for alcohol after two pints. I like sitting in the pub and chatting, but the part where you get drunk is a bit boring now.

I had to stop drinking for about 4 or 5 months last year because I got really sick, but now that I've been able to start drinking again my alcohol tolerance is completely shot. So I really need to tone it down, but because of my group of friends, I'm finding this pretty difficult. I think I just need to man up and say no to drinking so often/much. But it's just so much fun, and I seem to have low self-control, which is the problem.

Not for health reasons, but I seem incapable of going and just having one pint these days. I probably average 2 nights during the week in the pub, and about 3 pints each night. Add that to the sometimes insane amount I drink at the weekend and you end up with a really poor plasticniki.

- Tea/Coffee
If a pub serves these then great. Possible potential for a coffee bender though (see cat_race's thread last week re. coffee benders). Needs to be drunk quickly before it goes cold so maybe not sustainable over the course of an entire evening.

Was on antibiotics for an infected wisdom tooth. (Wouldn't normally let antibotics stop me from boozing, but the dentist told me not even to use mouthwash or it would make me explode, so I listened for once.)

I was wondering whether it was easier because we were out of our usual routine, what with the quiz not going ahead, but with hindsight, I think that made it more of a test. if anything, It would have been v easy for me to just get shitfaced , esp given the kind of mood I was in (:/) I am very proud of us both. Verbal on the other had is a reprobate, with his two pints of lager.